What if Apple had conducted the 'Mojave Experiment'?

In watching the many negative blog posts and comments about Microsoft's "Mojave Experiment" -- designed to try to distinguish perception from reality around Vista -- I can't help but wonder how different the take would be if it were Apple doing the same kind of marketing campaign.

In watching the many negative blog posts and comments about Microsoft's "Mojave Experiment" -- designed to try to distinguish perception from reality around Vista -- I can't help but wonder how different the take would be if it were Apple doing the same kind of marketing campaign.

In the past few days, I've seen commentators claiming everything from Microsoft is trying to dupe consumers, to Microsoft purposefully didn't discuss the enterprise versions of Vista because the company no longer cares about business users.

The Mojave campaign is aimed at consumer users, and not business ones, for a few reasons. Apple's market share is growing in the consumer/retail space far more than in the enterprise space. That said, Microsoft and other tech vendors/watchers increasingly believe in the concept of the "consumerization of IT," meaning that if a user gets used to something at home, s/he will gravitate toward that same brand at work. At the same time, many business users upgrade unthinkingly to whichever operating system their reseller/integrator delivers to them. If they're getting new PCs and they come preloaded with Vista (with an option to downgrade to XP included as part of their license agreements), so be it.

The real "taste test" for me, when talking about Microsoft's strategies vis-a-vis those of its competitors, is how users would react if "Apple" (or insert other vendor name here) had launched its own version of the Mojave Experiment. What if Apple tried to recover from its MobileMe mess by showing users who had heard that Apple's successor to .Mac was a disaster a new version, codenamed "Gobi"? Then -- surprise -- users were told it was really MobileMe. I'm sure commentators would be raving about Apple's marketing prowess and savvy --not about Apple's lying, cheating ways.

As I've said before, Microsoft's Vista launch could (and probably will) be a Harvard Business Case Study on how the development and delivery of a product that should have been a shoo-in went horribly wrong. But I have to give the Softies some credit: After months of silence, they're finally trying to do what they should have done a year ago, namely, figure out how to fix not just the technology mistakes, but the marketing ones, that they created with Vista.

Do you think Microsoft should have left "Mojave" in the desert? Or would you like to see more marketing around Vista along these lines?